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dotarray writes "From the article: 'Rockstar Games are no strangers to legal action, but it doesn't come stranger than this. An American model, Michael Washington (known as "Shagg") is suing the publisher — as well as parent company Take Two Interactive — because they based Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on his life.'" It's a good thing Washington never learned the infinite ammo cheat.

I know locally in the US midwest the junk yards are buying scrap steel + iron for $200 US per US ton. Based on this, the 10,000 british ton ship at $200 / ton is worth $2.2 million USD to a dealer who will put a lot of labor into tearing it down. Torn down into just scrap, I would say the ship is worth about $8.8 million.

In fact, the two cases are not interchangeable. Suppose the problem is dressed up a little: you have two cars that you use on a regular basis (this is not negotiable), but only enough money to replace one of them. One car gets 33MPG, and the other gets 10MPG. If you replace the 33MPG car, you can get a 50MPG vehicle. If you replace the 10MPG, you can get a 20MPG vehicle. Which would save more gas, replacing the 33MPG car or the 10MPG car?

The correct answer is neither unless 1) the question is "which would save you more gas?" or 2) you plan to scrap one of your two cars instead of reselling them or trading them in.

Assuming both of your current cars work today, by reselling one you increase the supply of used cars which allows one additional carless person to able to purchase a car, and total gas consumption is now the sum of your two cars plus that of your new car. You can however impress your green friends by bragging about how you improved your mpg and "how much gas you're saving."

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Day traders produce exactly two things: personal wealth, and market instability. They add nothing to the GDP, and are basically leeches. Imagine if everyone quit their jobs and became day traders. Nobody would be producing any goods and the economy would collapse instantly. The leeches would have nothing on which to feed.

If by "market instability" you mean increased liquidity which increases 1) the amount of capital our society puts to work (we're more willing to invest in businesses when we're confident in the ability to liquidate the investment in the future at the time of our choosing) and 2) the ability of the market to efficiently allocate capital (lowers the transaction cost of moving capital from poor investments to good investments), I agree.
Additionally some day traders increase the speed of price discovery penalizing speculators, which further increases the efficient allocation of capital (increasing production)within the market.

As a thought experiment - Imagine if we all became Doctors, nobody would be producing any goods and the economy would collapse instantly.